The Land of Tomorrow

By William B. Stephenson

'The Land of Tomorrow' is the memoir of William B. Stephenson about his time in Alaska. Stephenson spent some years there, first as manager of the Pacific Cold Storage Plant and afterward as United States Commissioner. "That the Voice of the North calls insistently to him who once has dwelt amidst its snows is neither myth nor legend. It is history. Like the Song of the Lorelei, having heard it once it rings in his ears forever. True, it is a strenuous game which Man plays against Nature in Alaska. There, as nowhere else on earth, he pays the price for what he gets."

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547317425

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William B. Stephenson

The Land of Tomorrow

EAN 8596547317425

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I NORTHWARD HO!

CHAPTER II THE LAND OF TOMORROW

CHAPTER III ST. MICHAEL

CHAPTER IV NORTHERN LIGHTS

CHAPTER V GREAT OPPORTUNITIES

CHAPTER VI POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

CHAPTER VII THE PARALLEL STEEL BARS

CHAPTER VIII FLOWERS AND BIRDS OF THE NORTHLAND

CHAPTER IX MT. MCKINLEY NATIONAL PARK

Moral.

CHAPTER X THE ALL-ALASKA SWEEPSTAKES

CHAPTER XI BURIED WEALTH

CHAPTER XII THE HAUNT OF THE SALMON

CHAPTER XIII THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER XIV THE CITIES OF THE FAR NORTH

CHAPTER XV THE NATIVE RACES

THE SONG OF THE INNUIT

CHAPTER XVI SOCIAL LIFE IN ALASKA

CHAPTER XVII THE PRIZE OF THE PACIFIC

CHAPTER XVIII ALASKA AND THE WAR

CHAPTER XIX ALASKAN WRITERS

AN IMPRESSION OF ALASKA

CONCLUSION

FOREWORD

Table of Contents

THAT the Voice of the North calls insistently to him who once has dwelt amidst its snows is neither myth nor legend. It is history. Like the Song of the Lorelei, having heard it once it rings in his ears forever. True, it is a strenuous game which Man plays against Nature in Alaska. There, as nowhere else on earth, he pays the price for what he gets. Yet if you ask one who has loved and left her, one who has lived among her mountains, experiencing alike the bitter winter and the wondrous Alaskan summer, every day of which is perfect beyond the power of words to describe, even though he may deny the call it is not difficult to detect the hidden longing underlying his reply. For it is a fact not to be gainsaid that after such an experience, no matter how much a man may have looked forward to a life of ease after his return, he seldom finds it satisfying. Usually when he goes back home it is to find his old friends scattered or dead. The old pleasures turn to gall and wormwood in his mouth. In time the jar and turbulence of cities get on his nerves. He begins to hear the Voice! The old residents of Alaska, they who have lived there so long that they seem a part of the land itself, always smile grimly when they hear a man begin to curse the land where he has made his wealth and swear that he never wants to see it again. To them it is an old story. They have seen many return to the regions whence they came. And they have seen most of them come back! They alone know the truth of the line from the old Norse legend:

"Dark and true and tender is the North!"

Following the opening up of the gold fields much was written of Alaska, but it was confined largely to the territory of the Yukon and the unsettled, chaotic conditions of the hour. The fortunate few who, through the medium of poem, song or story, have revealed the glories and the tragedies of this part of the country have done their work well. The record of that now-historic stampede to the Klondike gold fields has journeyed to the uttermost parts of the earth. But all this was twenty years ago. The Alaska of to-day is not what it was then, and there are sections of this marvelous country which no artist has yet painted and of which no poet has yet sung. Were this not true the present scribe would have no task,—no reason for adding to the list.

Sixty miles north of the mouth of the Yukon lies the little island of St. Michael on which the writer spent five years (first as manager of the Pacific Cold Storage Plant and afterward as United States Commissioner), journeying later from this island to almost every spot in the country which the white man has yet penetrated. Moved by the astonishing discovery during a recent visit to the States that there is practically nothing to be had in any library in regard to this island, so important a connecting link between the Yukon and the outer world, he is inflicting this little volume upon a patient and long-suffering public. He has been moved to do this, not from a desire to pose as a creator of literature, but because of a belief which can not be shaken that Alaska is The Land of Tomorrow! It is the only bit of Uncle Sam's territory where it is still possible for a man to get in on the ground floor. Now that the great World War is at an end thousands of soldiers are coming home again—to begin life over! They will be seeking a new environment. Travel, especially by water, even though (as is the case with those lately in the service) it be under difficulties and not always of one's own choosing, never fails to breed wanderlust in man. It awakens something within him which urges him to go adventuring, to seek the far spaces of the world, no matter how much his heart may cry out to him to stay at home. In Alaska there is room for all who know how to fight! Untold opportunity for him who is willing to fight! With a physique made strong by the life in the trenches, with muscles hardened by military training, the returned soldier will be fitted as he never has been before and perhaps never will be again to cope with the somewhat rigorous life demanded of him who dwells north of fifty-three.

Alaska is calling for men,—men to cultivate her farms, to develop her mines, to build her railroads, to man her fisheries and her lumber camps. She will soon be asking for business men to manage her stores, for lawyers, doctors and dentists, for teachers, ministers and priests, for actors and motion picture operators. In another year Uncle Sam's great railroad will be running Pullman cars across this sparsely-settled country. This means progress. Alaska will begin to live. She will prove a good although at certain seasons of the year a frigid mother to thousands yet unborn. The homely old proverb in regard to the early bird is peculiarly applicable to Alaska. The worm is only waiting to be caught.

To know Alaska is to love her. As one old North-Pacific sea captain once put it,—A man can get along without the woman he loves if he has to. But he can't get along without Alaska after he has fallen in love with her!

It is Robert Service, however, who in The Spell of the Yukon has breathed the real spirit of the land:

"Some say God was tired when He made it;

Some say it's a good land to shun;

May be. But there's some as would trade it

For no land on earth—and I'm one!"

W. B. S.

St. Michael, Alaska.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Table of Contents

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[xvii]THE LAND OF TOMORROW

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THE LAND OF TOMORROW

CHAPTER I

NORTHWARD HO!

Table of Contents

MEMORY, with unerring exactitude, carries me back to a never-to-be-forgotten day,—the twenty-ninth of May, 1909,—the day on which I sailed from Seattle on the S. S. St. Croix to take charge of the plant of the Pacific Cold Storage Company at St. Michael, Alaska. In my early manhood I had studied law, but the years immediately preceding this date I had spent among the great forests of British Columbia in charge of the interests of the British Columbia Tie and Timber Company. It was a life which appealed to me,—one which I loved and had planned to follow during my working years. But man proposes! And that inexplainable thing for which we have no definite name,—call it fate, fortune, destiny, or what you will—often disposes! Some sudden and utterly unforeseen event, almost in the twinkling of an eye, will change the whole current and meaning of a man's life. Such an experience was mine. So, like Columbus of old, I set forth once more upon the uncharted sea of life in search of a new world.

The last decade has brought about marvelous improvement in travel northward. Most ocean voyages are eventful and mine was particularly so. Therefore it may not be amiss to begin with it. At that time sailing to Alaska was unlike voyaging to any other part of the world. Man knew not whither he was going or whether he would return. The air of mystery which broods ever over all the northland seems to cast a spell upon the traveler from the moment of starting. Once there, the Land of Silence wraps her arms about him and holds him close, sometimes absorbing him!

There are two routes by which one may make his way northward. One is by what is known as the Inside Channel, by far the more beautiful and diverting and carrying him into the heart of the Yukon territory. The other is the Outside Passage and bears him directly across to the Alaskan Peninsula and thence around the coast to Nome. It was the latter route which I took on my first voyage to Alaska.

No man can see the lights of Victoria or Vancouver fade behind him without a feeling that he is standing in the dawn of a new life. Behind him lies the known; ahead, the unknown! From Vancouver to Skagway, up the Inside Channel, is a wonderful journey of a thousand miles, and as the boats pull away from shore one sees lying to right of him the mainland of British Columbia and to the left the island which bears the name of that intrepid explorer who navigated the then unknown waters of the North Pacific and charted them. Those who now journey northward will never realize their debt to Captain Vancouver. To the land-lubber the journey up the Channel seems fraught with a thousand dangers. But not so. Not a sunken rock but this old sea-dog has charted it, and the vessels thread their way with the utmost safety through a perfect maze of islands. To realize the miracle of this thousand miles of tangled maze one has but to stand in the bow of the boat and attempt to pick out the channel through which it will pass. He will guess wrong every time. One can not distinguish the isles from the shore. The mountains crash skyward, seemingly from the very deck of the vessel itself. But the inexperienced can not tell whether they crown an island or are on the mainland. The tourist gazes with admiration, not unmixed with awe, at the countless little bays and straits through which the boats twist, turn, creep forward and ofttimes turn backward! And so it is until the thousand miles of water, with its fairy islands and its gigantic icebergs lie far behind him,—a part of that past upon which he has turned his back.

The journey of the St. Croix (making the outside trip) was uneventful until we reached Cape Flattery. Here we encountered a terrific storm from the northwest. For a couple of days we had had a feeling that the glorious Pacific was in one of her sullen moods. It began with a gray sea and a few flying clouds. Followed a head wind which knocked fifty miles off the day's run and then,—a real storm, a miniature hurricane. It continued with unabated violence until we were within a day's run of Unimak Pass, at the foot of the Alaskan Peninsula. For six days we had sailed straight across the ocean to northwest, seeing nothing but sky and water,—huge, mountain-like waves which rose and fell with monotonous regularity. When we reached this point, however, we had a little diversion. Great numbers of walrus were splashing about in the water and lying on the ice. Here, also, I saw the first whales I had ever seen.

One of the sights of this ocean voyage is Mt. Shishaldin, an active volcano nearly nine thousand feet high and located about thirty miles east of Unimak Pass. In symmetry and in the beauty of its curves it rivals Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan. No geographer has ever visited Mt. Shishaldin. No man has yet ascended it. Unimak, the island on which it stands, is a continuation of the Alaskan Peninsula, being separated from it only by a narrow strait. Like the rest of the Aleutian chain, it lies between Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

It was about three o'clock in the morning of June ninth that we sighted the volcano. Scarcely any one on board had retired, as none wished to miss the view of the mountain. It is safe to say that none regretted the loss of sleep. It was a sight long to be remembered. Directly over the smoking cone the early-morning sun, dark red of hue, was slowly rising. The effect was most spectacular and—symbolic! No work of the Master's hand so symbolizes